Today’s Leftist Extremism and ‘Cancel Culture’ Was Baked Into ‘Liberal Democracy’ From the Outset

One of the most disturbing trends in American, and broader Western, culture today, is the fact that any deviation from leftist orthodoxy, from ‘woke politics,’ can get one’s life destroyed in a matter of minutes.  An offhand joke made waiting on the tarmac for a flight can lead to a reaction that means no job, no friends, and no home by the time one lands at their destination.  Holding to beliefs that were completely unremarkable and widespread a mere 5 or 8 years ago can do the same.  Merely standing in a public space waiting for a bus and minding your own business can, with the right kind of propaganda, lead to a nearly life-destroying episode before one’s life has even begun.

Most people wonder what in the heck has happened.  How have we gone from the free speech extremism of the 1960s to the totalitarian speech policing of today?  I might argue that all have been part of the same overarching movement, a movement intended to destroy Christendom, that uses different tools at different points of its long march through the institutions, and which has no problem at all in contradicting itself, or spouting literal double-think almost constantly.

Still, most would conclude that there was a sunny, happy time in liberal democracy, a golden age we’ve somehow lost.  Many people believe the closer one gets to the roots of today’s liberal free market state’s founding, the closer one is to an ostensible ideal.

But this may not be the case.  In fact, many of the intellectual framers of today’s liberal state, from back in the time of the endarkenment, realized some of the tragic implications of the godless, at-war-with-the-Church system they were proposing.  In fact, several of the most key “enlightenment” thinkers realized that what they were doing was proposing a contrary religious-cultural system to the then-existent Christendom, and that they looked forward to war with Christendom, and that to the hilt. Some of these thinkers were very explicit about this, as you will see below.

From Rousseau’s The Social Contract, an exegesis on how those who rebuffed the new order would have to be treated, and that quite savagely:

While the civil profession of faith (in the civil authority) can compel no one to believe them, it can banish him, nor for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing at need his life to his duty.  If anyone, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does nto believe them, let him be punished by death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law. [These same liberals supposedly hated blasphemy laws, and yet here is one of their leading lights publicly calling for death for blasphemy against the “sacred” state’s “sacred” laws!]

The dogmas of civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary……..Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected……Now that there can be no longer an exclusive national religion, tolerance should be given to all religions that tolerate others, so long as their dogmas contain nothign contrary to the duties of citizenship. But wheover dares to say: “Outside the Church there is no slavation,” ought to be driven from the State,  uless the State is teh Church, and the prince the pontiff.

So much for the tolerance of the new religion!  Let no one think to be joined to Christ who is not prepared to be crucified under Pontius Pilate, for the godless state is ever satan’s arm.  

And the revolution made clear from the beginning that any deviation from it’s orthodoxy, no matter how slight, would eventually be brutally punished, even with death.  It was politic for the revolution, for a time, to pretend otherwise, to pretend open-mindedness and magnanimity, but no longer.  As it nears its Omega point, the revolution drops the mask, and even schoolchildren can be crushed and destroyed – and that, for doing nothing at all wrong – solely for the ease of the revolution.

It was the same, of course, in the Soviet Union, and Maoist China, and Ortega’s Nicaraugua, Venezuela, etc., etc.

The only force capable of resisting this always advancing secularist onslaught is Catholicism – traditional Catholicism, since there are so many fake varieties today.